While the first looks ridiculously bad, no one outside of hardcore Trekkies ever saw it. There was a reason the show was being cancelled, after all.
Never been embarrassed to be a Trekkie. All the fuckwits around me like reality TV and soaps instead, they should be embarrassed. Everybody I know thinks of me as the Doctor Who and Star Trek guy. Rather support these than any dumb sports team.
Shatner has earned the right to wear that uniform any damn time he wants, for any reason. He can be buried in the effing thing as far as I'm concerned The Frakes/Sirtis thing still makes my stomach turn a bit
I think Sirtis still looks good. Frakes has let himself go, but he mostly directs now, no? No need to look like he did when he was 30.
I've always wondered why they couldn't show Riker and Troi on the USS Titan or something. At least then they wouldn't have to pretend they were younger than they really were. Probably cheaper to show the Enterprise-D (not to mention more nostalgic) than having to design a new ship. As for Shatner, as long as it comes with a paycheck I don't think he minds much.
You're talking about a character that brings down alien civilizations because he does not agree with their world view. See Return of the Archons, The Apple, etc. I daresay he would mind, sir!
I've often thought this myself. Certainly I hate the useless attempts to shoehorn it into an existing TNG episode framework. If it had been set on the Titan they could have simply had Riker facing a brand new crisis of confidence and looking for answers in the holodeck, it didn't have to be the Pegasus incident in TNG season seven. Structurally the episode would have been exactly the same. I think you're right. They were going for the nostalgia angle. But (for me at least) it ended up being a fail. The more they tried to convince me, the less convinced I actually was...
neither was particularly embarrassing. Whatever problems there were in TATV were with the story, and the Shatner stuff was fun comedy.
Not the best start, then. To answer the question, Riker and Troi in Enterprise was not the best executed episode, they should have just set it on Titan, it would have been nice.
They were trying to give ENT a lasting legacy in the Trekverse by having it be relevant in a Trek show set later. The end with the various Enterprises and the legendary "space, the final frontier" speech by the three Enterprise captains is a testament to that. You can only have that end if the framing story is set on one of the later Enterprises. The easiest solution was to have it play on the Enterprise D (actors are still around and not too old to reprise their roles, they have holodecks). Obviously, there are many ways to come up with a better story (even without using the holodecks) and it wasn't necessary to squeeze it into an existing episode but the reason why it was set on the Enterprise and not Titan are pretty obvious.